Gripla - 2023, Blaðsíða 147
145THE END OF Á R N A S A G A B I S K U P S
office of a provost, nor will he keep the staður at Holt unless he becomes
more powerful than me’ (‘skal Þorvaldr eigi hafa prófastdæmi, ok eigi hefir
hann staðinn í Holti nema hann verði ríkari en ek’).16
Undeterred by these menaces, Árni moved against one of Hrafn’s most
important supporters in the region, Eiríkr Marðarson, who had himself
earlier appropriated major church farms, including Holt, and had spread
Hrafn’s message throughout the Western-fjords. Confronting Eiríkr at
his farmstead at Eyri in Arnarfjörður, the bishop enumerated his misdeeds
and demanded that he repented before God. When Eiríkr refused, Árni
excommunicated him. Eírikr then sent a messenger to Hrafn with news
of what had occurred. Hrafn immediately asked Eiríkr to meet him in
Steingrímsfjörður where they could arrest Þorvaldr Helgason together.17
Árna saga biskups now offers further information about Þorvaldr. Hrafn
refers to his ‘forn fjandskapur’ (‘old enmity’) towards the prófastr. It tran-
spires that Þorvaldr and his brother, Aðalbrandr, had never repaid Hrafn
fifty marks that they had borrowed from him in Norway.18 Þorvaldr had
manifestly once been on sufficiently good terms with Hrafn to solicit such
a loan from him in the first place.
Árni learned about Hrafn’s plans and was waiting for him with his
retinue in Steingrímsfjörður when the royal representative arrived there
to arrest Þorvaldr. An ill-tempered discussion ensued, but in the end, they
made an uneasy truce in which they agreed to uphold whatever judgement
was reached by the king and the archbishop.19
iii
At this point, in the year 1287, a stylistic shift can be observed in Árna saga
biskups.20 Before this juncture, overt biblical and other learned references
are infrequent, but thereafter they become more prominent. One of these,
of particular interest for our purpose, is the saga’s comparison of Árni with
the Prophet Elijah, and of Hrafn with Elijah’s adversary King Ahab:
16 Guðrún Ása Grímsdóttir (ed.), 151.
17 Ibid., 160.
18 Ibid., 162.
19 Ibid., 162–164.
20 Haki Antonsson, ‘Árna saga biskups as Literature and History’, The Journal of English and
Germanic Philology 116.3 (2017): 278–279.